Barack Obama – the world’s your climate stage

There is some hope in the world since Obama was elected. He proposes a firm target for reducing emissions together with an ambitious list of measures to achieve that goal, including a cap-and-trade system apparently far tougher than any attempted elsewhere.

Obama will not commit the United States to meet the Kyoto emissions target – a cut to 6 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. Instead, his goal is to get back down to 1990 levels by 2020. This will be a relief to most European countries. During the 11 years since the Kyoto pact was signed, most of the 38 industrialised countries that accepted targets have made little progress toward meeting them. A little sad this is; but with the US now heading in the right direction there is now a consensus and mandate to act for all industrialised countries.

Barack Obama also made some interesting comments on on the Bush administration during his campaign: “This is the administration that commissioned government experts and scientists to do a study on global warming, only to omit the part from the final report that said it was caused by humans. This is the administration that didn't try to improve the Kyoto Treaty by trying to include oil guzzlers like China and India, but walked away from the entire global effort to stem climate change. And just recently, this is the administration that tried to silence a NASA scientist for letting the rest of us know that yes, climate change is a pretty big deal.”

As far as I can see Bush was just an active supported for Climate Change. Having to spend so much time in Washington, he wanted to use Climate change as a way to quickly get the North East coast to become the new Florida. Simple thinking really for a very simple man! Although Bush put the world at a stalemate for a decade, this new leader may help write the history books for an evolution to sustainable energy economies.